Wow, things are not so bad as they usually are at the tag end of August in Arkansas — the weather is unexpectedly temperate and the movies aren’t that bad. At least not this week.
Piers Marchant notes that with Blue Jasmine, “Woody Allen has returned from his years’ long European sabbatical … cinematically touring some of the great cities in Western Europe — London, Paris, Madrid, Rome … he’s back in the United States and has made … one of the more intriguing noncomedies of his career.” Marchant also kind of likes the scary movie You’re Next, which, he notes is “not a film that takes itself terribly seriously … but it still wants very much to create an atmosphere of dread, even as it is constantly tearing down its genre pretensions and poking fun at itself. It’s a … sort of a low-budget cross between Thomas Vinterberg’s brilliant family drama The Celebration and Bryan Bertino’s genuinely unnerving horror thriller The Strangers, with a better sense of humor.”
Similarly, Dan Lybarger was pleased with Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, a British comedy that signals the end of the so-called “Cornetto Trilogy,” all of which starred Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. And Philip Martin found Blackfish to be a “heartbreaking” documentary that takes SeaWorld to task for its treatment of orcas.
Oh, and Joss Whedon’s modern dress version of Much Ado About Nothing finally arrives. And then there’s this thing called The Moral Instruments: City of Bones, which Lybarger describes as “the mutant result of a drunken one-night stand between Harry Potter and Bella Swan.”
Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette MovieStyle for full reviews.